essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
Bellies lined with pyttipanna, we refill our water bottles and stride home from the city centre towards Block 5.
listen
words pass overhead
spoken broken in dialogue slang where South
is said “SOUF”
You scribble on a piece of paper, pausing every two minutes to remember. Your memory isn’t what it used to be. But you try anyway.
We sing the songs filled with sadness,
Songs with lyrics written in silence
I dreamt one night about a bright-eyed young woman with dark hair who accused me of being unfaithful to her. Her accusations were apparently true, which troubled me deeply after I awoke. I had never been unfaithful to anyone but had myself suffered the pain of betrayal once or twice when I was young. I…
any blotched greenery has
the potential to burst
forth into flower.
Nobody knows, but I sometimes fantasise about what my partner’s childhood and teen years were like… I feel a great tenderness when I explore this town
Where cars lie dying
in Ligurian scrapyards
the Via Aurelia
travels slowly past
Tuesday
morning with no people, no cars
only today there are no people,
no cars. Today it’s weird, isn’t it?
braid me yes plait me
no plate me
don’t make me
The concept of choice feminism operates under the principle that any decision made by a woman has the potential to be a feminist choice, so long as it was made with political consciousness.[1] However, the political and social theorist, Steven Lukes, argues that an individual’s actions are guided by what they can imagine to…
Red shift Dark-moon cry of you half-him of you, starring backwards axe of you, mastered as youth Teeth of you biting down, tenderizing, sharpening if only for a night The many-fold you, thorns, garden, squall of you, intoxication Thief, the noble cat of you, insistent splinter The wild-world’s red eyes beating in you Me wrenched…
Today I woke up slightly ill and with a sense of nostalgia that was only just bearable.
On the riverbank. In the corridor. In the
laugh ache. In the small hours. On the
station platform. In the stomach churn
on the way home.
No one is ever prepared for these dreaded words: your husband’s got cancer. I should have known, but I didn’t. For months, my husband Russ complained of muscle weakness, nausea, blood in his stools, and dizziness. His new primary care provider, a man lauded by his young receptionist as a “genius”, said, “If you…
My bones willow and bite.
My lungs are a workshop. The thing is, I
want to be both engine and earth.
I find the process of actually writing fiction to be like some sort of mysterious alchemy. You have a plan and then what actually comes out is completely different.
A glimpse into a young woman’s summer working in a quaint town in Provence on the night of an open-air concert.
I ask my body ‘what is life?’ it says ‘dance’
because dance is a way the body finds liberation
through lyrics, solace in songs, an overeager mosaic
of marinated moments & coralled colours colliding.
We are most expressive with our eyes, even more so when disoriented.
I have never felt it so clearly: the field of independent, potential affirmatives, the ‘yes’, the ‘yeses’ to all of the pleasure and power, freedom, purpose and desire that is mine to choose and discover.
Wonderful insights into the books you should be reading while self-isolating, from passionate book instagrammer Miriam Gauntlett.
The fluttering ribbon of blue
outside my window deepens
but holds fast to the birches.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, we have collated eight of our most accessed posts by women.
My friend the tarot reader repeats,
but she is a little drunk,
translucent fingers unfurling,
while shade, levered by branches,
we keep walking
maybe fearful of touching
in front of others
unable to be completely who we are
two men with love
happily growing older
together
“For most of us living in Europe or the US, we’re so used to seeing altered rivers that we don’t know what a wild river looks like.”
It’s hard being a poet in 2020
Which is when this will be published
If you have the GUTS to publish it
Which I doubt
Being bitter & twisted
C.S. Barnes reflects on her complicated relationship with food through the years, from comfort eating to comfort starving. Features discussion of eating disorders.
She’s pulling up weeds from the flowerbed
And then starts feeling one tug back,
Wrapping her water grip and dragging her
Through the claggy earth.
